Water woes loom as thirsty generators face climate change
As electricity demand surged to keep air conditioners whirring, power plants confronted shortages of cooling water that forced shutdowns and led to inefficient operations. And that problem is expected to worsen as climate change intensifies summer heat waves and droughts in already-arid areas.
Water is no longer an afterthought for power plant planners, said Bob Goldstein, the Electric Power Research Institute's senior technical executive for water and ecological systems. That wasn't the case so long ago when proximity to transmission lines and fuel dominated power companies' planning.
If current trends continue, power plants will be withdrawing 7.3 billion gallons a day by 2030 -- equal to all U.S. water consumption a decade ago, according to a Department of Energy report.
Ironically, nuclear power plants -- touted by the nuclear industry and its supporters as the answer to global climate woes because reactors don't emit greenhouse gases -- need more freshwater to keep from overheating than other generators.
Thirsty reactors - The average reactor needs more than 830 gallons of freshwater per megawatt hour. All but about 3 percent of that is returned to the stream, but it returns much warmer, the Energy Department said in a report to Congress last year.